With his debut novel, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times, the Guardian journalist Xan Brooks proved himself a writer of solidly constructed historical fiction. In his second book, he tells the story of the ‘song-catchers’, mercenary (usually white, usually male) panhandlers who scoured the Deep South not for gold, but for musical riches: hillbilly and blues tunes that would make them a fortune in New York’s burgeoning gramophone business. 

Opening in 1927, the novel follows the young, principled Irish Catholic John Coughlin as he criss-crosses the Appalachian Mountains with primitive recording gear, looking for his breakthrough hit. There he encounters music played on ‘banjos and fiddles, washboards and dulcimers … sacred songs and chicken songs; shanties, reels and laments’. But he finds nothing that will shift half a million copies – not, at least, until he hears about Moss Evans, a black teenage guitar picker who runs bootleg liquor in the Mississippi Delta. When the levee breaks after torrential spring rain, Coughlin finally locates Moss and they begin an eventful and arduous journey to New York with his songs.

There is no real friction between Moss and Coughlin as characters. Tension is instead provided by the ethical dilemmas a song-catcher faces. Coughlin sees himself as a kind of white saviour avant la lettre, but in reality most catchers are ‘con-men and crooks’ who believe that ‘it’s the catcher who